In France the Impressionists , Monet, Van Gogh, etc. were considered by many of the trustees of the Louvre to be street art at one time.
They kept them in a small building hard to find. Then they moved them into an old train station that is so beautiful it deserves to be in the Louvre all on its own.
This gave them a chance to place many things they had which were truly worth seeing on display there.
The Van Gogh of two peasants in a haystack is mesmerizing and a painting of some workers scraping a floor is so good I often go to see it several times in the same visit. These two works don't show well in repros.
This fortunate little museum can draw from the Louvres collection, of which only about 10% is able to be displayed at a time.
The museum store is clever. They sell reproductions of art objects that don't exist like the single pearl necklace I got for my wife. It is depicted in a Goya with a naked lady wearing it on a couch.
Nice looking couch too, but they didn't have one of those for sale.

"I've never even seen a fine art first hand, and don't care if I ever do."

It's difficult to believe that isobars is so devoid of sophistication and culture that he could make such a statement. I understand that many folks may not have been exposed to fine art in their life, and I wouldn't hold that against them, but to blow it off like it was something not worth the time is a sad state of mind. So much of civilization and history is built on the arts. How hollow life would be without art in our lives?

He never saw La Pieta.
It is in alcove in the Vatican. Carved on the spot by a ceiling painter named Mike Angelo who was a prisoner there at the time. They pretended like he was a guest but there were guards at the door.
It is big white marble statue of a dead guy laying on the lap of a lady in a big flowing robe. We came upon it unknowing in 1970.
It leaves you breathless in a crowd of similarly affected people. I saw the guards shake people back to earth out of kindness.
They tell me Jesus and Mary are depicted but that has little to do with this statue. The way the robes move, the line down his body to his pointing hand, have a power that fills the air.
Back on earth some similarly affected psycho took a hammer to it to save everybody and now it is behind bulletproof glass and only the mighty stand in its presence.
The effect is a good bit less from there but not to be missed.
Greatest work of art I have ever seen.

For some idea of how out of touch the big city media are about real world personal finance and how clueless the public are about this joke laughingly called a tax relief act, consider the WSJ's analysis of it. Their weekend story on it assessed its federal tax increases on four hypothetical families:
1. Single parent, 2 kids, income $260,000, fed tax increase $3,356.
2. Retired couple, income $180k, no tax change.
3. Single person earning $230k, tax increase $2,907.
4. Married couple w/2 kids earning $650,000, taxes up $21,608.

Tell me what's BLATANTLY wrong with all those scenarios.

C'mon ... you can do it. Just think about it; what do every one of those scenarios have in common, besides the fact that Obama has been guaranteeing us for 5 years now that only #4 will ever see one dime in tax increases?

Simple: WHO THE HELL EARNS THAT KIND OF MONEY? AFAIK, I've never personally, socially, nor on the job met but one person in my life who earned even that $180k, and he was a very senior USAF general who managed budgets in the tens of billions (as my wife has done for MUCH less money. Only a very senior DuPont executive we met one time, for a short lunch, topped those figures.

Big city people have no clue how ordinary people live. Look at the reaction of the media to Kerry's "elite" sport (uh, WSing), to Bush's low-life mountain biking, etc., but Obama's mainstream celebrity sport, basketball, and his glistening pecs make Pelosi all hot and bothered. Even O'Reilly, who grew up poor, assumed a social worker he was interviewing earned $50-$60k ($20k!). I'll never forget national news anchor Harry Reasoner's outraged tirade against snowmobiles, nor that the environment had nothing to do with it; his sole objection was that it's a mindless, pointless, incomprehensible waste of time ... that only the fine arts qualified as honorable entertainment.

I've never even seen a fine art first hand, and don't care if I ever do. Maybe when I'm too old to golf or kite I'll go look at one.

Then there's the Manhattan AT&T customer support chick who refused to believe that there was no street address of the exact location at which I could not get a cell signal; she could not comprehend that the population of Three Mile Canyon in the Gorge includes FAR more rattlesnakes, ground squirrels, and coyotes than people, nor that there IS no intersection right there. She thought I was trying to be funny, and demanded the name and street number of the nearest building.

She had never been out of New York City ... in her life ... and didn't understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else.

They just don't get it.

Are you kidding me? Are you this clueless? The average nitwit engineer 's starting salary at Zillow is $132,000. Throw in some stock options, and he's at 250,000, year ONE! If you spent one day in the private sector, you would know that big earners are everywhere, especially here in the Bay Area, where you need to make 300,000 just to afford a decent house.

And he is just a hop skip and a jump from the Seattle Art Museum which has a fine collection. Talk radio and art are both intended to stir your emotions. There may be a substantial difference in the amount of joy you get out of the latter--if you are capable.

By the way, if you get to Seattle, check out the Leda(and the swan) by John Covert, donated by my grandfather. When it could have been in my living room...

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou cannot download files in this forum